In that post you set a local variable (#input) and then use that variable in your code to set the focus. With the searchbar being generated how would I assign a local variable to it? In my case I have the searchbar hidden until a search button in the navbar is pressed, at that point I unhide the searchbar and would like to set focus and open the keyboard at the same time.

Worked for me using the below. Any less than 600 and it doesn’t work for me.
I’m not reloading the page so I don’t really understand why I need to do this. In a web app I can just keep the focus in an input and search on each keypress. This feels like a hack.

Ok I realised it was because I was using a LoadingController that I was losing focus on the SearchBar. I removed this and added a spinner to my list and problem resolved. No need to use setFocus in this case.